Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Feminism and the Senses: Nayan Shah

Why, when
and how does the refusal to eat while in detention become a viscerally potent
and politically volatile protest that challenges the legitimacy and conditions
of incarceration? — Nayan Shah

A professor of American
Studies and Ethnicity and History at USC,Nayan Shah is a researcher who challenges
conventions of social history by exploring the intersections of medicine, immigration,
racism, capitalism and intimacy in relation to
the U.S. and Canadian states. “His previous work
on contagion scares vis-à-vis East Asians immigrants and homosocial networks
among S. Asian laborers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has shaped the fields of American history and gender and sexuality
studies,” says Rachel Lee, Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Shah’s
new work on mass hunger strikes of political prisoners in South Africa,
Israel, and Guantanamo, and refugees in the U.S., Australia and Europe led Lee
to invite Shah to give the inaugural lecture in the Center’s 2015-2016 speaker
series on “Feminism and the Senses: Sense Data and Sensitivity in an Age of
Precarity.” On October 28, Shah will give a talk on “Refusing to Eat: Sensations, Solidarities and the Crises of
Detainee Hunger Strikes.”

The Feminism + the Senses
lecture series addresses how social movements around gender, sexuality, and
race have a crucial relationship to sense data, sentimentality, and
sensitivity. It opens up for collective exploration the question of which
sensory registers have been favored by our scholarly disciplines where they
intersect with feminist and queer activism. At the same time, this series aims
to catalyze reflection on the “sensitizing concepts” that have historically
been of value to feminist and queer scholarship and those prospective concepts
arising in other social justice movements that have yet to become sensitizing
to feminism.

Drawing on feminist theories of bodily subjectivity, affect
and ethics, Shah will explore how sensory data, sensation, and sensitivity to
human suffering mobilizes social justice movements, bioethical
controversies, and challenges to state power. His
current research examines prison hunger strikes and transformations in medical
ethics and human rights movements across the past thirty years by exploring
struggles in apartheid South Africa, refugee asylum and political prisoner
protests in Europe, Middle East and Australia, and most recently in the
California Prisons and in Guantanamo.

In a recent essay—"Feeling for the
Protest Faster: How the Self-Starving Body Influences Social Movements and
Global Medical Ethics," a chapter in Science and Emotions after 1945, edited by Frank Biess
and Daniel M. Gross
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)—Shah opens
his exploration of the self-starving body’s role in social movements and
medical ethics with a quote from George Annas’ article
on “Hunger strikes”in
the British Medical Journal in 1995 (311:1114):“The power of the hunger strike comes from
the striker’s sworn intent to die a slow death in public view unless those in
power address the injustice or condition being protested.” In his analysis,
Shah shows that there are three dimensions of emotional responses and actions:
the mobilization of feelings of sympathy as well as anxiety, outrage, and sadness
within the followers of a social movement; the self-management, mental
discipline, and emotional regulation of the hunger striker who practices resolve
and fearlessness; and the conflicting emotions experienced by physicians caring
for patients who are hostile to treatment and interacting with state-controlled
regimes that undermine the autonomous authority of medical professionals as
well as quality of care and patient trust.

Examining the hunger
strikes of Gandhi and Cesar Chavez and their mobilization of social movements,
Shah provides a brief yet in-depth analysis of how each man’s fasting was
culturally and socially situated in their respective communities and fostered a
distinct emotional response from their followers: “Gandhi and Chavez explained
their emotional state in undergoing their fasts as a fearlessness that
necessitates the cultivation of spiritual conviction to fortify one’s mental
resolve when actions that are detrimental to one’s own body can be understood
to be for the collective good” (“Feeling for the Protest Faster,” 248).In juxtaposition to these two singular
examples, Shah also details a clinical study of 33 South African political
prisoners engaged in a hunger strike, which
provided a scientific breakdown of the body’s decomposition and resulting
symptoms due to starvation. These results were used in the medical community to
encourage physicians to provide better medical advice to patients and other
doctors. The resulting global medical ethics established have eclipsed the
realities of other communities surrounding the striker and created another sort
of fearlessness and independence to protect the medical professional from
intense external pressures. In Shah’s words, “Fearlessness is an approach that catalyzes intense emotions of anger,
distress, and despair and transmutes them into a capacity to endure for the
sake of justice physical pain, deprivation, and suffering without capitulating
and abandoning deeply held principles” (“Feeling for the Protest Faster,” 244).

Shah’s
new research once again challenges conventions of social history by exploring the
intersections of capitalism, intimacy, immigration, racism, citizenship, and
the state—as in his
first two books: Stranger Intimacy: Contesting
Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (UC Press, 2012)and Contagious
Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (UC Press, 2001). Contagious Divides examines the problem
of citizenship and the governance of modern society through an analysis of
public health and Chinese immigration in San Francisco from 1854 to 1952. By vividly detailing how representations of Chinese
immigrants shifted from medical threat to model citizen over this time period,
this book documents the history of racial formation in the U.S.It
traces how the public health rhetoric of the contagion of Chinatown bachelor society
provided white politicians, white middle-class female social reformers, and
white male labor leaders the necessary foil against which they were able to
elaborate a vision of the norms of nuclear family domestic life and a sanitary
social order. Thomas Bender,
Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies at NYU, and editor of
Rethinking American History in a Global
Age, lauded Contagious Divides:"Shah has
written a book of exceptional originality and importance. With a focus on
issues of body, family, and home, central concerns of urban health reform, he
illuminates the role of political leaders, public opinion, and professionals in
the construction and reconstruction of race and the making of citizens in San
Francisco. He brilliantly analyzes the politics of the movement from exclusion
to inclusion, regulation to entitlement, showing it to be an interactive
process. Yet, as he shows with great subtlety, the mark of race remains. As a
study of citizenship and difference, this work speaks to a central theme of
American history."

In Stranger Intimacy, Shah follows the experiences of South
Asian migrants and their social and intimate relations in the United States and
Canada from 1900 to the 1940s. According to Inderpal
Grewal, author of Transnational America:
Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, “Stranger
Intimacy shows us how a diverse set of laws produced immigrant subjects
through race, heteronormativity, and the white, nuclear family. ‘Stranger
intimacy,’ in Shah’s brilliant concept, is the site of regulation, struggle,
and possibility.” “Based on virtuoso research interlaced with a lucid and
compelling analysis, ” writes Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the
Attack on Democracy, “Stranger
Intimacy challenges the assumptions at the heart of most social history.
Refusing to separate political economy, state practices, racialization, and the
regulation of domesticity and sexuality, Shah reads legal and bureaucratic
archives for stories of non-normative sociality among multi-racial transient
migrants in the early twentieth century.”

Shah’s work illuminates heterogeneous
social relations by repudiating the tired constructs that separate the study of
political economy, state practices, racialization, and the regulation of
sociability.

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Part of CSW's Gender Research and Equity Committee initiative, with support from the Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs, FEMINISM + THE SENSES will
feature